Baha'i News -- Azeri religions committee head against airtime for religious sects on Public TV

Azeri religions committee head against airtime for religious sects on Public TV

Source: BBC Monitoring Central Asia
Publication date: 2002-10-16

Text of report by Azerbaijani TV station ANS on 16 October

[Presenter] Chairman of the State Committee for Work with Religious Structures [SCWRS] Rafiq Aliyev is against providing
religious communities with airtime on public television. He believes that this would destabilize the balance between religious
sects.

[Aliyev speaking in his office] There are religious sects pursuing diverse aims in Azerbaijan - Baptists, Jehovah's Witness,
Greater Grace Church, Krishna Consciousness, Baha'is, Satanists and others. If we provide them with airtime on public television
and broadcast their rituals in Azerbaijan, relations and parity between those religious communities will be violated. Because
the Protestant religious communities cannot tolerate one another and their relations are so strained that they do not even want
to sit at one table.